A major concern among employers is the issue of presenteeism, or the phenomena that, while employees may be at work, health problems such as, lower back pain, fatigue, high blood pressure and obesity, keep them from working optimally, and cause a rapid rise in employee healthcare costs. Many human resource (“HR”) executives consider presenteeism a problem in their companies, estimating an annual cost to companies of over $180 billion/year, and a per employee cost between $22 and $157 annually. Moreover, presenteeism appears to be a problem at over 50% of workplaces. In 2006, 56% of HR executives viewed it as a problem, while only 39% of HR managers found it to be a problem in 2004. Because such health problems may be caused by a combination of employee lifestyle and work practices, workplace health programs have been employed to make employees aware of sound health and ergonomic practices in an effort to promote employee health and help lower employer costs.
Unfortunately, even if employees are made aware of sound health and ergonomic practices, employees often slip back into poor health and ergonomic practices while engrossed in their day-to-day work activities. The current state of the art solution to address these issues includes health programs that rely on periodic tests to assess employee health and ergonomics. Such tests typically require employees to expend a great deal of effort to participate in the programs. For example, health programs may monitor the employee's health via test conducted in test facilities at discrete testing times (e.g., quarterly or annual health tests). Thus, existing health programs may require the employee to take time out of their day to attend a health test, existing health programs may not assess the employee in their day-to-day work environment, and existing health programs may not provide continuous feedback that can be used to dynamically adjust the employee's day-to-day activities and/or may not be able to rapidly identify and predict health issues based on changes in the employee's health.
Further, the current health programs may provide feedback in the form of traditional results that may not be effectively communicated to the employee or may not communicate information for improving the employee's health. For example, current health test results may include a listing of results that may or may not be readily available to the employee, and may not include any suggestions for improving the employee's health. Thus, even if the employee does review their test results, the employee may not be provided the tools to improve their health. Such an environment may discourage employees from participating in health programs as the employee may not want to expend the effort required to decipher the results and may not have the knowledge of how to improve the various aspects of their health.